Source: Theregister
The persistent gap between venture enthusiasm for autonomous purchasing agents and their actual market deployment reveals how AI applications still struggle with real-world friction—trust, liability, payment security, and merchant incentives all remain unsolved. These are ecosystem constraints, not technology constraints: retailers lack margin incentive to route transactions through a third-party bot layer, and consumers won't adopt tools that cede purchasing decisions to automation without proven cost savings or convenience gains. The timeline slippage suggests we're looking at a feature-set problem disguised as an AI breakthrough. Expect these to arrive, if at all, as narrow capabilities embedded in existing platforms rather than standalone agents.